10 Exciting Texts on CommonLit Famous stories, poems, and articles your students will love One of the most important but time-consuming tasks for teachers is finding engaging reading passages for students. CommonLit saves teachers... Amanda Riddle Amanda Riddle August 21, 2017 · 7 min read
LaVelda’s Story Asking Real Questions to Get Real Answers When most teachers are enjoying a summer break, LaVelda is hard at work teaching her summer school students. She is unfazed by the... Rob Fleisher Rob Fleisher August 17, 2017 · 2 min read
Tabatha’s Story Engaging Advanced Readers with CommonLit Tabatha’s decision to become a teacher can be traced back to her experiences as an undergraduate in New York. She was living there during... Rob Fleisher Rob Fleisher August 13, 2017 · 2 min read
Roster Management Tools for Easy Organization Welcome Back Series: Part I -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Happy August, teachers! We hope you were relaxing and recharging for the next school year. Here at CommonLit [http://www.commonlit.org], summer is a... Rob Fleisher Rob Fleisher August 3, 2017 · 4 min read
New and Improved Assignment Reports Welcome Back Series: Part II -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By now, you may have already read about updates to our class roster systems on CommonLit [http://www.commonlit.org]. If not, check out that... Rob Fleisher Rob Fleisher August 3, 2017 · 2 min read
5 Professional Development Horror Stories How to build PD that teachers love I recently polled the curriculum team at CommonLit in preparation for this blog post. I asked them to tell me about a time... Rob Fleisher Rob Fleisher August 1, 2017 · 4 min read
Using Data to Drive District Success The best way to get your team behind a big goal “Year-end tests are autopsies, not assessments: they explain what went wrong after it is too late to change... Rob Fleisher Rob Fleisher July 26, 2017 · 5 min read
Ditching the Test Prep Doldrums Keeping students engaged in rigorous work I began teaching in Washington D.C. in 2010. The year before, the city released the following question as a possible prompt that 7th... Rob Fleisher Rob Fleisher July 26, 2017 · 4 min read
Add Rigor and Engagement to your Next Novel Unit Use CommonLit’s Book Pairings to push your students’ thinking English standards from around the country demand a lot of teachers. For example: * Texas says that middle schoolers should “read... Rob Fleisher Rob Fleisher July 23, 2017 · 4 min read
Driving Discussion with the Socratic Method In this post, teacher Cara Popecki shares advice for building a student-centered class dialogue. Socrates was on to something when he pushed his student Plato to the pinnacle of... Rob Fleisher Rob Fleisher July 14, 2017 · 4 min read
The 7 Hallmarks of Effective Feedback In this guest post, educator Liz Nell describes how to take your feedback to the next level. As educators, we inherently know that feedback is important. But why is feedback... Rob Fleisher Rob Fleisher July 14, 2017 · 5 min read
Meagan’s Story Social Studies Needs Literacy Too! Meagan’s husband often asks her, “Don’t you have enough to do?” Her response is usually a chuckle, followed by, “No, I need more!... Rob Fleisher Rob Fleisher July 13, 2017 · 2 min read
Transformative Tools for ELLs and Struggling Readers Make reading accessible for all of your students Before I joined the team at CommonLit, I was a Special Education middle school reading and writing teacher. In the classes I... Rob Fleisher Rob Fleisher July 7, 2017 · 2 min read
Kimberly's Story Inspiring the next generation of STEM students After working 25 years in the tech industry, Kimberly was compelled to switch gears and become a science teacher. Recent college grads had... Rob Fleisher Rob Fleisher October 1, 2016 · 3 min read
